The advancement in technology has shown a tremendous impact on all the major aspects of businesses including marketing. Digital marketing transformation has become a central contributor to the way marketing strategies are designed in today’s businesses. Instead of relying on laborious customer surveys to determine the success of a campaign, digital marketers depend on the comments left by customers on the Facebook page of the company. The face of famous celebrities on highway billboards has given way to a new generation of Facebook or Instagram influencers who are much more approachable.
Digital transformation has also paved the way for enhanced connectivity between the businesses and their stakeholders. With so many social media platforms, emailers and online review platforms, digital transformation technologies have changed the way companies interact with their customers. Cold calling and general emailers are fast becoming things of the past—they are being replaced by customised marketing pitches.
Digital transformation innovation has also changed the way companies compete with each other. The fight over maximum air time on television has been replaced by the hunt for the most effective keywords or roping in an influencer with the maximum number of Instagram followers. With further advancements of technology in the digital media space, the future of digital transformations for marketing looks very bright.
If you are curious about what are the other effects of digital transformation on the marketing approaches of modern businesses, this blog has you sorted. Read on to find out more about how going digital has changed the way companies sell their wares.
Business intelligence
Marketers now use the power of digital marketing transformation to identify and monitor their competitors. At a time when the competition in many industries and markets has intensified, businesses need to know everything about the firms with which they share the playing field. Following competitors can, for example, help marketers identify prospective customers and learn about the challenges that similar companies face.
Another important digital media trend involves learning from the social media failures of competitors. By simply observing what tactics have succeeded and failed for competitors, companies can eliminate much of the trial-and-error experience that costs a lot in terms of time and money.
Marketing insights
The single, biggest 'blind spot' in marketing prior to digital transformation was the lack of high quality, actionable data for marketing experts to make decisions. Once a poster for a subway station was created, or a commercial for television was produced, there was no accurate way to engage the effectiveness of that marketing content. How many people saw that subway poster? How many people watched the commercial on television, let alone went out and bought the product strictly because of it?
Analytics was a game-changer for marketing and digital transformation continues to emphasize just how useful it is going to be in all future marketing efforts. For example, a video on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms can tell a marketing team exactly how many people watched the video. Moreover, if those people click on the "call to action" button taking a viewer to a website it's easy to measure how effective the video is in converting people. More granular information is available, such as which social media platforms people watched the video on, where these people live, or what time of day the video garnered the most views and clicks.
In other words, digital transformation now gives marketing experts much more precise user data and metrics, allowing them to tweak and optimize marketing plans. Knowing what doesn't work or what does and just how well makes it possible for marketing campaigns to be more responsive and targeted.
Personalisation in campaigns
One of the most effective ways that the digital transformation has changed the way digital marketing works is the way it can now personalize content to individual customers.
Due to the combination of metrics and interactivity, it’s now possible to track the actions and behaviour of consumers at an individual level, then take that data to provide a personalized marketing response.
Keeping track of customer purchase, and then suggesting similar products—or in some cases, 'refills' for consumable items—is just the tip of the iceberg. Now, with the metrics from social media platforms like Facebook, it's possible to track the interests of individual customers, make recommendations, and even send personalized emails based on that consumer behaviour before they convert.
Increased proactivity with automation
Timing can be critical when it comes to influencing a purchasing decision. A consumer may be 'on the fence' about making a purchase, even getting so far as to take the preliminary steps to make a purchase, only to stop right at the shopping cart phase, before committing to an actual purchase.
Automation combined with metrics means that consumer behaviour is being tracked, it can be addressed without necessarily requiring a human to supervise the activity and be lucky enough to catch it and react to it in time. Digital transformation now means that when certain data or actions are recognized, the software can act upon those conditions to send emails or personalized responses quickly, without needing to notify a human agent to act on a time-sensitive issue.
This type of automation is now increasing as chat-bots even take on the role of basic customer service support for simple tasks, improving marketing response and productivity.
Digital transformation innovation can potentially affect a huge spectrum of business operations and marketing activities. The key is to understand what's involved, learn from digital leaders across sectors and ensure your company has the technology, processes and talent in-house to progress and thrive.
